The Hobbit: What has made the book such an enduring success?

As the 75th anniversary of JRR Tolkien's novel The Hobbit approaches, expert
Thomas Shippey asks why it still manages to capture imaginations today.

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JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit

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An illustration of the lands featured in JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit

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Ian McKellan as Gandalf in The Hobbit

By Thomas Shippey

3:32PM BST 20 Sep 2012

Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the publication of JRR Tolkien’s children’s book The Hobbit. It was well received on first appearance, slightly oddball children’s books from Oxford professors being an accepted thing. Tolkien himself reported sardonically that one of his Oxford colleagues had bought two copies, because he’d heard that first editions of Alice in Wonderland were now fetching a good price.

But the book created only enough of a splash for his publisher Stanley Unwin to ask for a sequel. The real furore only started when, 17 years later, the much overdeveloped sequel appeared as The Lord of the Rings.

Today The Hobbit has sold 100 million copies and been translated into something like fifty languages, including (two of Tolkien’s favourites) Icelandic and West Frisian. One hopes Tolkien’s colleague got him to sign those first editions he bought in 1937, and that his children held on to them, for a good copy with a dedication by Tolkien in it went for £60,000 four years ago. Prices will undoubtedly go up once Peter Jackson starts to bring out his Hobbit movies — three of them now planned, so we hear — beginning late this year.

What has made the book such an enduring success? There are lots of reasons why one would not have expected it to be. Too much poetry! No female characters at all! (How will Jackson get round that one?) A lot of professorial quibbling over words!

But maybe Tolkien’s boldest defiance of accepted children’s-fiction practice was that he offered no child figure for the reader to fix on. It’s true, the hero Bilbo Baggins is “only a little hobbit”, so he’s a kind of surrogate child, but he’s put in positions no child could be expected to identify with.

Like finding himself alone, in the dark, playing riddles for his life with a creature who means to eat him, or being trussed up by a giant poisonous spider, or — worst of all, alone and in the dark once again — being sent down a tunnel at the end of which he can hear a dragon snoring. Tolkien presents a very cold-blooded image of courage, and expects it to be understood.

He adds to it the element we call moral courage. Bilbo decides (on his own again) that his dwarf companions have got it wrong in their greedy defence of the dragon treasure, and so secretly gives away the greatest treasure of all, the Arkenstone, to his friends’ besiegers, to use as a bargaining point. And then he goes back to be exposed, in the end to confess, because they’re his friends still.

Anyone could have told Tolkien this is not kids’ stuff. Nor, for instance, is the death of Thorin Oakenshield. An American lady told me once that she read the whole book to her sons, aged seven and ten, and when they got to this scene, she saw the tears rolling down their cheeks. Until JK Rowling started producing 700-pagers, publishers used to say that children’s books had to be short nowadays, because the kids’ attention spans were also short.

They were wrong. Just as she brought back length, so Tolkien boldly, or maybe unthinkingly, brought back emotional depth.

Much of this came from the ancient heroic world of epics and sagas, and fairy tales too, which Tolkien drew on so much. His re-creation of Middle-earth has affected every fantasy writer since, even those who struggle to get away from it. If we imagine elves and dwarfs, trolls and goblins and dragons, Tolkien’s images will be the basis for them. You can make changes, like Terry Pratchett, whose elves are heartless monsters and whose dwarfs are at axes drawn with trolls, not goblins, but Discworld had Middle-earth as a model.

Tolkien made publishers realise that heroic fantasy was potentially mass-market. Even George Martin’s Game of Thrones might not have found a taker if Tolkien hadn’t made the first breakthrough.

Politically correct, of course, The Hobbit was not and still isn’t. One of its most attractive characters — in a way — is Beorn. It’s perfectly clear that he is a were-bear, and his manners are frankly bearish. He’s also, and this is a feature borrowed from Norse sagas, not someone to hang around with once evening comes on. Once Beorn has been tricked into listening to the dwarfs’ and Bilbo’s story, and so having to offer hospitality to no fewer than 14 visitors, he warns them not to leave their quarters before sun-up. Anyone can tell this is good advice.

Beorn goes off by night, in bear shape, to check the story of conflict with the goblins, and is in a much better mood on return. The story has been confirmed by a goblin and one of the Wargs, the intelligent wolves the goblins ride. What happened to his informants, Bilbo asks. Beorn shows him a goblin head and a Warg skin. Good guy to have on your side, right. Children’s books nowadays are supposed to have a Problem, but the Problems aren’t usually dealt with quite as directly as that.

Gollum, too, is a brilliant creation. Why does he call himself “we” all the time? In the end Tolkien (and Jackson) hinted that he had a split personality, with the old hobbit-self Sméagol lurking underneath the Ring-corroded Gollum, but in 1937 that was far in the future. Tolkien just had ideas which were capable of immense development.

He was good at landscapes, too. He got the name “Mirkwood” from very old poetry indeed, but his description of it — dark, untrodden, spider-haunted, and above all stiflingly airless, like the long-closed room of a very elderly relative — is one of the great forest pictures of English literature, which has many of them, from Robin’s Sherwood to the stoats’ Wildwood. The Misty Mountains are another borrowing from Norse. And the hobbits’ Shire is now the world’s image of England. (Not of London: that’s Sherlock Holmes.)

Some time in late 1914, Tolkien and three of his schoolmates decided they would bring about a cultural revolution in England, seemingly through poetry. It was a project of astonishing self-confidence for four young men just out of school, and a Birmingham grammar school at that. Within three years two of them were dead and Tolkien was in hospital, invalided from the Western Front. They succeeded, though. Tolkien may not have brought about a revolution, but he did set up a counter-revolution, quite against the literary tide of irony and self-doubt.

He brought back old images of heroism and epic action, old mythic patterns, and fixed them in the modern mind. The Hobbit was his Odyssey, Tolkien an unexpected and unlikely Homer.

Dr Thomas Shippey is the author of 'JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century’. For information about Hobbit anniversary events around the country, visit www.hobbitsecondbreakfast.com. Peter Jackson’s film 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ is released on Dec 14